"Multiple state bar associations have threatened us," Browder said. "One even said a referral to the district attorney's office and prosecution and prison time would be possible."
"The truth is, most people can't afford lawyers," he said. "This could've shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could've helped them win cases."
Cant have robot stealing jobs from lawyers, can you imagine a machine replacing you with no prospect of compensation? What kind of society does that with the threat of poverty 🤔.
honestly i feel like this kind of thing is exactly what AI should be used for, if it has to exist at all. 99% of what happens in a courtroom is rote, especially shit like traffic tickets. in most cases a lawyer isn't a supergenius advocate for justice with deep knowledge of the legal code and precedent, they're an actor performing a play they've done dozens of times before, in a language too arcane for most people to bother learning.
Agree that traffic court is the best place to test shit like this but sprining it on the court in a live trial without any prior regulatory approval or oversight was never gonna fly.
Like maybe broken bones are really easy for a medical AI to diagnose in theory but no hospital is ever gonna let some guy follow the instructions of a medical AI on a live patient without going through some due diligence.
"I tried to pay a guy to let me operate on him using AI instructions and suddenly I was getting 'threats of jail' for it!"
Well sure, but the reason it's like that is to make a whole slew of people feel important and validated for having such a stupid system. Replacing the rote ritual with an AI is a bit on-the-nose for showing how pointless it all is, so will never go too well.
One of the times we ought to side against the luddites (though obviously not the real luddites).
Why? Law-talking-guys gotta make money too, they are workers. Yes, it's a largely made-up and unnecessary industry, but so are most.
For myself I would say it's more that unfortunately the system has a giant gaping hole in it, and it's the poor who are falling through that hole. There aren't nearly enough public defenders to represent the many, many poor folk who need them, and if this system keeps people out of jail and/or prison, I'm fine with supporting them over lawyers. I wish lawyers the best as they're also workers, but unlike real life luddites, there are lives depending on the outcome of trials. People who go to prison as good people can come out the other side broken and so much worse for the experience. The justice system has so many flaws in it, it's unreal; cops being incentivized to make an arrest vs actually solving a crime, prosecutors being on unethically good terms with police, defendants having to rely on public defenders and all the issues that brings (I read a case a while back of someone whose public defender was on drugs at the time of his trials and was absolutely unable to represent him well), etc.
If people's lives didn't depend on the outcome of a court, I'd be fine with supporting lawyers, but unfortunately it does.
How many people froze to death in rags because Luddites smashed the looms that made clothing affordable?
Much as I don't personally see the overall incarceration rates of good people depending in any way on the availability of an entity able to produce a legible defense; I could be wrong, and get the point, seems a fair position.
you know what, that's a good point, and I can't think of good counterargument, except maybe that deprofessionalization would push them into solidarity with the unskilled working class. I will say, though, that I think defense of the professions from technological obsoletion is less critical because, as detailed in the article, they are not nearly as threatened by it. They are already more organized in bar associations against such industrial threats, so that even if some of their work could be automated, they have a force of arms against it that the labor unionist left doesn't have the resources to meaningfully contribute to anyway.
I lost my case because my lawyer was the free version of OpenAI, while my opponent was using the paid OpenAI+ service.
Man loses court case because the court-appointed AI defending him, instead of using precedence to prove their client's innocence, generated an image of Brad Pitt wearing Space Marine power armour fighting a giant and enraged cartoon version of Siouxsie Sioux. 'We fed in the wrong parameters. It was an honest mistake.' claimed the court AI technician.
if the courts are so overwhelmed just make the police arrest less people
In the UK whenever the jails get too full they just start letting non violent offenders out early
“The truth is, most people can’t afford lawyers,” he said.
I love when they outline a real and ongoing problem...
“This could’ve shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could’ve helped them win cases.”
...just to hawk their stupid product as a cure-all.
Yes, I definitely want the proverbial infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters to compose my legal defense. I see nothing wrong with this.
AI :saul-stare: : "But did you actually see my client commit any crime?"
:thumb-cop: : "No, but he was acting suspiciously. He's definitely guilty. I am never wrong about anything"
AI :saul-stare: : "Apologies. My training data only goes as far as 2021. I may be out of date on some topics and make mistakes. If you say my client is guilty he's probably guilty."
This hits the nail on the head. We have AI that can reproduce patterns of speech, that's it. We do not have AI that has motivations and can meaningfully argue adversarially, especially if the opponent knows just how to guide that pattern of speech.
It's more for people that get railroaded for minor offenses because they can't afford the expensive lawyer to get them off because they don't know the exact magic incantation to say to the judge to not get max sentenced on misdemeanors.
Ive literally seen two people, on the same day in court, in there for the exact same crime, same circumstances, go up one after the other. One has the expensive lawyer, one doesn't know what is going on.
First guy gets off without even a fine, second guy 2 years probation and a week in jail.
And probation isnt just like showing up once a month. You have to pay for that. It's expensive. And if you don't they hold jail time over your head.
Yeah our legal system is literally just there to make sure poors stay in line, and the ones that don't get the absolute piss beaten out of them until they do, or just throw them in prison for the free labor.
How do you know the lawyer didn't just spout nonsense and the judge just decided each case based on defendant income? Your free AI lawyer does nothing to address that issue.
Because it was me. I was the guy getting railroaded.
My friend in the court next to me had much more money than I did, from his family, and I had none.
Neither of us with any criminal background either.
Now more than ever I'm convinced that the judge went lenient on your friend because he looked like Brock Turner (affluent and going places) and an AI lawyer wouldn't make any difference in outcomes for indigent defendants like the rest of us.
I mean I had options I didn't know about. The state I live in has a plea for leniency for first time misdemeanors, but you have to know to say that to the judge. that's how the friend got off, that's what his actual lawyer did because he knew the specific incantation to say lol
So if anyone had bothered to mention that to me, I would've been fine. The counsel I had didn't bother to check if I had a record or not.
Just anything to tell people what is going on and what your options are is infinitely better than just showing up to court and having no idea what is going on.
I definitely don't see it as a solution, but it's fuckin something at all to give defendants an idea of what is about to occur to them
We already have the solution for this: public defenders. Yes, they're overworked and underpaid (on purpose), but the fact remains that they are the solution to this problem, not some fancy whizbang technology.
Yeah no shit people getting representation is a much better solution...
But since the representation they get as it stands is completely garbage, and it would require a complete restructuring of the entire system, this would be a nice little helpful tool to people who otherwise aren't getting proper representation
Isnt this the AI that they managed to teach how to fuck up mathematics and insist on the fuckups being correct?
I dont think you gotta buy into this just cause all of a sudden the default techbro spiel of "shifting the balance" and "giving power to the people" happens to coincide with an actual area where it sounds better than elsewhere.
This guy literally isn't even a lawyer, hes a 19 year old techbro with a background in US NGO shit like "Freedom House", the place that churns out the maps that mark the "international community" countries as mega free and everyone else as authoritarian 1984.
Edit: Also the "jail threat" is because you can't just practice law and represent someone else without a license, you can represent yourself in some cases cause you're the one getting affected, but if you dont have a license and fuck up or do malpractice its not like they could punish you for it like a lawyer can have their license revoked.
Yup. ChatGPT cannot defend a court case or write a report. Even helping you do those things is complicated and dangerous.
The model doesn't know facts. It doesn't know truth from falsehood. It doesn't know legal procedures, or legal history. It's a ML model that generates plausible sounding text, nothing more.
It can generate really convincing legalese but it is fundamentally incapable of understanding logic.
Meh, when it comes to law, lawyers are really good and logical. The problem is equating law with morality, and many lawyers like to delude themselves into thinking that is the case.
With the banning of the lawyer chatbot, guess which nation just left the mega free list!
The law is too arcane and the legal system dramatically too complex for regular people to be able to enforce their rights without loads of money?
Reform the system? Or give you a chat bot that will generate a decent Wikipedia article summary about your predicament that is probably correct?
Do I have to use the AI attorney to represent me in my ineffective counsel appeal?
This module isn’t available in your zip code but I can offer you a subscription to plea deal AutoAssist
Some startup techbro was walking around bragging about how he was gonna pay people to let an AI defend them for traffic shit in court and the courts told him to fuck off cause practicing law without a license is a crime.
Wearing AR glasses and an earpiece in court? Lol most people are nervous as hell and that sure won't help at all.
Seriously if the AI was good enough to know legal procedure, it could just walk you through what's going on beforehand.
In the US you often have to invoke precedence, which is kinda stupid and say what you want.
In civil law of other states it is the judges job to reasonably explore the avenues which might be the case and which might help the persecuted, too. So for example if I have no idea what the law is and say something wrong or that isn't the case, then it is the judge's responsibility - in principle - to see what I actually meant. In practice judges are dicks, but it is better than to force humans to invoke spells from arcane knowledge and with words that don't reflect reality.
On the one hand it's insane that we've reached this point AND there's pushback against it, on the other, public defenders are overworked and have to cater to tons of clients because poor people are treated as second class citizens and can't do their absolute best with every client because they literally can't and ChatGPT could've given folks a fighting chance in court.
